


The Last Days of the Old World

by scioscribe



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Angst, Deathbed Vigil, M/M, Not Star Trek Beyond Compliant, Time Travel Theories, multiverse theories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24186289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Jim has been sitting at Spock Prime's bedside for a few days, waiting for the end, when their conversation turns to the old Jim Kirk. Spock's Jim Kirk.Specifically, to his eyes.
Relationships: James T. Kirk & Spock Prime, James T. Kirk Prime/Spock Prime
Comments: 19
Kudos: 203





	The Last Days of the Old World

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt "100 words of lies of omission." I'm bad at brevity.

“I know he’d want to be with you,” Jim said. “The old me. I’m probably not a great substitute.”

He looked down at the Ambassador’s— _Spock’s_ —hand in his, taking in the raised veins and the slightly crepey skin. If he remembered Old Spock’s stories right—and hey, you didn’t forget someone telling you about your alternate universe death—they’d never had much of a chance to be old men together in that timeline. And they wouldn’t now. Not him and this Spock, anyway.

He’d been at this house on New Vulcan for three days now, waiting for the end of all this. The room they were in was greenhouse-hot, because right now anything cooler hit Spock hard, like a little draft from an open window was an avalanche on Delta Vega. He was supposed to get young Spock, his Spock, there for the funeral, but not before then. It was shitty to watch yourself die.

And surreal to watch someone die knowing he’d been your husband in a different life. It was a distraction, sort of, for the sweat rolling down the back of his neck.

It took a lot of effort now for Spock to talk, but he kept doing it anyway. For what purpose, he’d said dryly, was he intended to conserve his strength?

“We have been friends for some time in our own right,” Spock said. “I appreciate your company, Jim. And—” He coughed, his chest rattling slightly. “I appreciate it all the more because you are _not_ a substitute. You are, and always have been, only yourself, not just some new iteration.”

“I guess he doesn’t deserve the blame for all my faults,” Jim said, smiling a little.

Spock’s mouth curved, too, but he didn’t let it rest. Jim didn’t know what it was he was getting at, but if it would make Spock happy to tell him, he was sure as hell willing to listen.

“You are separate from each other. It is—” Another cough. “Your eyes.” He lifted his hand like he was going to touch Jim’s face, trace the arc of one eyebrow, but he didn’t have the strength for it, and he relaxed onto the bed again. “My Jim had hazel eyes. The warmest you could imagine.”

“I—”

“Have the brightest blue,” Spock said fondly. “I knew you at once, of course, as _a_ Jim Kirk—but not mine. And what a relief that was, Jim.”

“Relief?” Jim said.

“For a moment, I thought it had all gone. All my life with him—all _his_ life at all. We had done so much with time, you know, and while the physics of it had always seemed illogically flexible, it was plain that the past could be rewritten, the present and the future erased. And I could not imagine that with him. Irretrievably gone. Understand me: I could lose him, I had survived that, but to have _erased_ him… Jim, I was so glad to see the color of your eyes. If they are blue, then I traveled not only in time but through dimensions. What was changed was not what was in my lifetime but what would have been in some other universe. This universe.”

Jim thought he understood. “Like the one you told me about, where you had the goatee.”

“Yes.” Spock was exhausted now. He said, very softly, “I have always loved your eyes. They are proof that I did not undo the one person who most defined me, the one I have loved now for what feels like an eternity.” The next sound could have been a cough or a chuckle; Jim wasn’t sure. Spock’s voice turned playful rather than wistful, like he wanted Jim to know he was still with him, not lost in the past. “And naturally the blue is quite striking. I understand your many dalliances.”

“Not so many these days.” He stood up. “I’m just going to go get us some tea, all right? Hot for you and cold for me. I’ll be right back.”

He stepped outside the room. It was a little less like a sauna out there, at least, but it was still hard to breathe.

He rubbed at his eyes.

His mom had let him try out all these different colored contacts when he was a kid, and he’d liked the blue so much that he rang in his eighteenth birthday with a bottle of tequila and a cosmetic tincture shift so expensive it had blown half his share of the sorry-your-dad-died money from Starfleet. His mom had been pissed. She’d liked the hazel a lot.

There wasn’t anything he could do about this. That was the hell of it—there’d never been anything he could do. He only existed at all because everything had already happened.

He went to go make their tea.


End file.
